Selecting curves w/Apple pen ( lack precision selecting)

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is there a way to adjust the accuracy when trying to select vector curves with my Apple pen? It is making adjusting my vector lines and points a living hell. It selects curves that are not even close to the one I want to select. I used to make this easier by switching to line view but this solution doesn’t work with iPad designer.

Maybe this is a bug? Not sure..

Thanks ✌️

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The only way you could adjust the "accuracy" would be to zoom into your work. It would actually be a lot easier to see what the issue is if you were to upload a Screen recording, with "Show Touches" on in Settings > General.

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Hmm … that doesn’t look very nice … of course, I am not talking about your drawing, Paige, but about the bug …

I removed the entire layer hierarchy to get a basically “flat” document, consisting of curves only, and I am seeing exactly the same selection problem as shown in the video above. Even at very high zoom levels. This is pretty strange.

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From what (very little) I can tell, this seems to have something to do with a lot of open, unfilled curves in close proximity. It is as if the app needs a closed curve to tell which object one is trying to select, if that makes any sense.

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A workaround would be to switch to outline view and that will select the curves correctly.

At least for the Selection_Bug_1.afdesign file, that does not work on my iPad. For example, try to select on the canvas the second curve in the mouth group, the one that forms the teeth, or just about any of the curves of the eye.

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@Paige, this is a known issue and already logged with our developers. A workaround would be to switch to outline view and that will select the curves correctly.

@carl123, we would be interested to know how you fixed this. Can you please share this with us? ﻿

moved to bugs

When zoomed in and looking at the curves that make up the hand, the stoke setting showed it was set to 54px, when they clearly did not look that big.

Also noticed that each curve could be selected by clicking way outside it's normal (blue) bounding box area. This extra selection area (let's call it Area 51) seemed to be related to the size of the stroke, which as mentioned was set to 54px.

I theorised that Area 51 was an invisible extra area of 27px (1/2 of 54px) all around the blue bounding box of each curve, which due to the numerous curves that made up the hand was preventing you from accurately selecting the curve you wanted. This was further complicated by the ordering of the curves layers which meant that some curves were more prone to be selected than others due to being above them in the layer stack.

Tests showed that by reducing the size of the stroke (54px) to say 5px you could then more accurately select the actual curve you wanted as the Area 51 effect was greatly reduced.

So what was causing Area 51?

Looking at he brush stroke profile (shown below) it looked to me like there was a lot of black surrounding the actual stroke of the brush

I then again theorised that this black area was what was causing the Area 51 effect

So I quickly screenshotted the brush stroke, cropped it to remove virtually all of the black area, saved it as a png file and created a new Intensity brush from it

( png file used shown below )

I then selected the main group containing all the curves (the "Doctor" Layer) and doubled clicked on the new brush I had just created to change all the curves to use that brush.

This created a large mess as the default stroke size was 64px but by then reducing the stroke size to a more reasonable value of say, 5px the image was made "whole" again.

Now the Area 51 effect seemed to be eliminated and you could easily select the actual curve you wanted without selecting nearby ones.

I do not know if the OP created her own brush or used one of the in-built iPad ones but either way recreating the brush without the black area around the brush stroke seemed to cure the problem in this particular case.

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And I don’t mean to play the devil’s advocate, but your theory would entail that if I would not apply a Texture Brush to my contours, selection would work perfectly. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I flattened the document hierarchy and used a Solid Line stroke with just a pressure profile on every contour. Yet, while the situation improves a bit, the precision problem still persists, even at very high zoom levels. Hmm.

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It's hard to comment on all occurrences where this problem may occur. I was only looking at the OP's supplied design file to see what I could do with that particular example.

If you upload the file (in your video) you are having trouble with someone may be able to see a reason why it is happening there or it may just be the case that there is still a bug somewhere that the Dev's have to fix at some point.

Due to the fact that Boris Johnson is now our Prime Minister, punctuation, spelling and grammar will never be worried about ever again. We now have far bigger problems to be concerned about.

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Looking at he brush stroke profile (shown below) it looked to me like there was a lot of black surrounding the actual stroke of the brush

I give up. How did you determine what was the Document Defaults for the brush(es)? When I try the only way I know to see a brush's document defaults, it depends on the brush I have selected in the Brushes Studio, not the curve I have selected.

What I did notice that might have something to do with the 'area 51 effect' is many of the curves had a pressure curve that never went above about 50% of the stroke width, but I don't see any obvious correlation between that & which curves are difficult to select on the canvas.

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I give up. How did you determine what was the Document Defaults for the brush(es)? When I try the only way I know to see a brush's document defaults, it depends on the brush I have selected in the Brushes Studio, not the curve I have selected.

Rightly or wrongly I just selected a curve and in the Stroke dialogue I just clicked on properties

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Yes, I do not have a compatible iPad (or any need) for Affinity on an iPad

Thanks for the confirmation. I was a bit confused because this topic was posted in the Bugs On iPad forum, so I was trying to figure out how much of this is caused by bugs on the iPad app vs. bugs that affect both versions, & what if any workaround would work on the iPad.